The Center for Animal Health and Food Safety (CAHFS) improves global animal health, food safety, and public health by building veterinary public health capacity, providing fact sheets and policy summaries, facilitating collaborative research, responding to emerging foreign animal diseases, and delivering relevant outreach. Creating and facilitating strong working relationships among food systems professionals and organizations, governmental entities, and academia is at the core of CAHFS. CAHFS believes an interdisciplinary approach is required to successfully address food safety issues drawing upon the knowledge, skills, and vision of all those involved.
As part of the research conducted in CAHFS, there are two main projects that require MSI resources:
- One project seeks to characterize genetically distinct subpopulations within serotypes and to estimate the sources attributing to non-typhoidal Salmonella enterica infections in humans and the transmission of acquired antimicrobial resistance genes. In addition, the evolution of selected important serotypes/subgroups will be evaluated by applying Bayesian Evolutionary Analysis by Sampling Trees (BEAST) models.
- The second project's aim is to compare the genetic determinants for resistance to key antimicrobials and the plasmids harboring them in nontyphoidal Salmonella enterica and Escherichia coli from multiple livestock species (swine, cattle and poultry) and humans.
Both projects involve the use of thousands of whole genome sequences (WGS) of these bacterial pathogens.
This PI's work was featured on the MSI website in June 2016: Determining Influenza A Virus Infections in Subpopulations of Pigs.